The Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets (VAAFM) will maintain and improve food and agricultural supply chain resiliency by partnering with organizations to purchase and distribute local food to underserved communities. VAAFM has active projects with five nonprofit partners—Abenaki Helping Abenaki, the Center for an Agricultural Economy, Capstone Community Action, the Vermont Foodbank, and the Intervale Center. We additionally have selected nine organizations through a competitive grant process that have started projects in March 2023.

The Utah Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) proposes to use Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) and LFPA Plus funds to establish a program that enables the purchase of local food products from disadvantaged farmers across the state and distribution of those products to underserved communities. This program will support Utah organizations to foster relationships with local producers and build capacity for sustaining purchases and distribution.

The Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA) is proposing to administer $37,800,000 through a noncompetitive cooperative agreement for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service’s (AMS) Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA).

The South Dakota Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources (DANR) will partner with Feeding South Dakota and other local and regional food system stakeholders to procure and deliver locally grown foods from local producers to underserved communities statewide. This project will connect South Dakota’s farmers and ranchers, including disadvantaged producers, to more opportunities to deliver their products to local markets through South Dakota’s extensive network of food assistance partners.

The South Carolina Department of Agriculture (SCDA) is requesting funding through a Cooperative Agreement with United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) under the Local Food Purchase Assistance Plus (LFPA Plus) program to facilitate the continued purchase and distribution of local foods within the state. SCDA is working with a network of aggregators, distributors, and farmers to purchase local foods from rural and socially disadvantaged farmers, as well as to distribute local foods to underserved areas.

The RI Department of Environmental Management will subcontract with Farm Fresh Rhode Island, who will in turn partner with Southside Community Land Trust, the African Alliance of RI, Commercial Fisheries Center of RI and the RI Food Policy Council to meet the following objectives, in alignment with the goals of the LFPA Program.

The Department of Agriculture of Puerto Rico, together with its attached agencies, focuses its efforts on the full development of our Puerto Rican farmers. Our initial program experiences some difficulties with the Hurricane Fiona due our farmers lost their produce. Around thousands of boxes of food harvested by local farmers where bought. Non-profit organizations received this box of food and they delivered to help the most disadvantaged populations and in turn, help farmers with the sale of the crops that survived.

The Pennsylvania Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (PA-LFPA) will be modeled after Pennsylvania’s successful state-funded PASS (Pennsylvania Agricultural Surplus System) Program. Unlike the PASS Program, however, which seeks to first recover food that might otherwise go to waste, the PA-LFPA will work with Pennsylvania’s local food system to exclusively procure top-graded, high-quality product for distribution throughout the charitable feeding system which serves all 67 counties in Pennsylvania.

Oregon Department of Human Services (ODHS) will work with subgrantee and key project leader Oregon Food Bank (OFB) to improve supply chain resiliency by building partnerships with local and regional producers, laying out pathways for alternative distribution channels to combat hunger.

The Oklahoma Local Farmers Programs for Underserved Populations identifies socially disadvantaged farmers and producers and providing an opportunity for them to distribute food products to local communities through partnerships with the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma and the Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma. This partnership provides food to over 1700 pantries and communities with the state of Oklahoma serving rural, remote, and low-income families.